Photonics: transparency on an optical chip.
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Robert W Boyd
Publications and source records attributed to Robert W Boyd.
Observation of backward pulse propagation through a medium with a negative group velocity.
The nature of pulse propagation through a material with a negative value of the group velocity has been mysterious, as simple models seem to predict that pulses will propagate "backward" through such a material. Using an erbium-doped optical fiber and measuring the time evolution of the pulse intensity at many points within the fiber, we demonstrate that the peak of the pulse does propagate backward inside the fiber, even though the energy flow is always in the forward direction.
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Transverse instabilities and pattern formation in two-beam-excited nonlinear optical interactions in liquids.
We describe observations of various transverse instabilities that occur when two laser beams intersect in nonlinear optical liquids. Patterns that we observe include two types of conical emission and the generation of a linear array of spots. These results can be understood in terms of the physical processes of self-diffraction, two-beam-excited conical emission, and seeded modulational instability.
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Pixel entanglement: experimental realization of optically entangled d=3 and d=6 qudits.
We demonstrate a simple experimental method for creating entangled qudits. Using transverse-momentum and position entanglement of photons emitted in spontaneous parametric down-conversion, we show entanglement between discrete regions of space, i.e., pixels. We map each photon onto as many as six pixels, where each pixel represents one level of our qudit state. The method is easily generalizable to create even higher dimensional, entangled states. Thus, the realization of quantum information processing in arbitrarily high dimensions is possible, allowing for greatly increased information capacity.
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Tunable all-optical delays via Brillouin slow light in an optical fiber.
We demonstrate a technique for generating tunable all-optical delays in room temperature single-mode optical fibers at telecommunication wavelengths using the stimulated Brillouin scattering process. This technique makes use of the rapid variation of the refractive index that occurs in the vicinity of the Brillouin gain feature. The wavelength at which the induced delay occurs is broadly tunable by controlling the wavelength of the laser pumping the process, and the magnitude of the delay can be tuned continuously by as much as 25 ns by adjusting the intensity of the pump field. The technique can be applied to pulses as short as 15 ns. This scheme represents an important first step towards implementing slow-light techniques for various applications including buffering in telecommunication systems.
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Enhanced nonlinear optical response of one-dimensional metal-dielectric photonic crystals.
We describe a new type of artificial nonlinear optical material composed of a one-dimensional metal-dielectric photonic crystal. Because of the resonant nature of multiple Bragg reflections, the transmission within the transmission band can be quite large, even though the transmission through the same total thickness of bulk metal would be very small. This procedure allows light to penetrate into the highly nonlinear metallic layers, leading to a large nonlinear optical response. We present experimental results for a Cu/SiO(2) crystal which displays a strongly enhanced nonlinear optical response (up to 12X) in transmission.
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Enhanced linear and nonlinear optical phase response of AlGaAs microring resonators.
We have constructed and characterized several optical microring resonators with scale sizes of the order of 10 microm. These devices are intended to serve as building blocks for engineerable linear and nonlinear photonic media. Light is guided vertically by an epitaxially grown structure and transversely by deeply etched air-clad sidewalls. We report on the spectral phase transfer characteristics of such resonators. We also report the observation of a pi-rad Kerr nonlinear phase shift accumulated in a single compact ring resonator evidenced by all-optical switching between output ports of a resonator-enhanced Mach-Zehnder interferometer.
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Dramatic enhancement of third-harmonic generation in three-dimensional photonic crystals.
We have observed a dramatic enhancement of third-harmonic generation in 3D polystyrene-air photonic crystals pumped by a near infrared laser beam. As the pump wavelength is tuned, the peak of the enhancement occurs when the third-harmonic wavelength approaches the short-wavelength edge of the band gap. We show that the origin of the enhancement is phase matching provided by the periodic structure of the photonic crystals.
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Breakup of ring beams carrying orbital angular momentum in sodium vapor.
We have observed filamentation due to azimuthal modulational instabilities in spinning ring solitons with orbital angular momentum m variant Planck's over 2pi in sodium vapor. We show experimentally that vortex beams with m values of 1, 2, and 3 tend to break into two, four, and six filaments, respectively. Treating the sodium vapor as a Doppler broadened two-level atomic system, we find that we can accurately model the propagation and breakup of these beams with numerical simulations.
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Quantum and classical coincidence imaging.
Coincidence, or ghost, imaging is a technique that uses two correlated optical fields to form an image of an object. In this work we identify aspects of coincidence imaging which can be performed with classically correlated light sources and aspects which require quantum entanglement. We find that entangled photons allow high-contrast, high-resolution imaging to be performed at any distance from the light source. We demonstrate this fact by forming ghost images in the near and far fields of an entangled photon source, noting that the product of the resolutions of these images is a factor of 3 better than that which is allowed by classical diffraction theory.
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Superluminal and slow light propagation in a room-temperature solid.
We have observed both superluminal and ultraslow light propagation in an alexandrite crystal at room temperature. Group velocities as slow as 91 meters per second to as fast as -800 meters per second were measured and attributed to the influence of coherent population oscillations involving chromium ions in either mirror or inversion sites within the crystal lattice. Namely, ions in mirror sites are inversely saturable and cause superluminal light propagation, whereas ions in inversion sites experience conventional saturable absorption and produce slow light. This technique for producing large group indices is considerably easier than the existing methods to implement and is therefore suitable for diverse applications.
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Observation of ultraslow light propagation in a ruby crystal at room temperature.
We have observed slow light propagation with a group velocity as low as 57.5+/-0.5 m/s at room temperature in a ruby crystal. A quantum coherence effect, coherent population oscillations, produces a very narrow spectral "hole" in the homogeneously broadened absorption profile of ruby. The resulting rapid spectral variation of the refractive index leads to a large value of the group index. We observe slow light propagation both for Gaussian-shaped light pulses and for amplitude modulated optical beams in a system that is much simpler than those previously used for generating slow light.
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Stabilization of the propagation of spatial solitons.
We investigate a class of vector ring spatial solitons that carry no net angular momentum. Specifically, we show analytically and numerically that the dominant low-frequency perturbations that typically disrupt ring solitons are suppressed for these solitons. By comparing our analytical and numerical results, we show that our simple analysis gives good qualitative predictions on the regions of stability for these beams.
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"Two-Photon" coincidence imaging with a classical source.
Coincidence imaging is a technique that extracts an image of a test system from the statistics of photons transmitted by a reference system when the two systems are illuminated by a source possessing appropriate correlations. It has recently been argued that quantum entangled sources are necessary for the implementation of this technique. We show that this technique does not require entanglement, and we provide an experimental demonstration of coincidence imaging using a classical source. We further find that any kind of coincidence imaging technique which uses a "bucket" detector in the test arm is incapable of imaging phase-only objects, whether a classical or quantum source is employed.
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Conical harmonic generation in isotropic materials.
A novel class of nonlinear optical processes is described in which radiation at the nth harmonic is generated through the use of a (2n+1)-order nonlinearity. Utilizing an odd-order nonlinearity, this process allows for the generation and amplification of both odd- and even-order harmonics in isotropic materials. Additionally, this process can always be phase matched in normal-dispersion materials without the use of birefringence. Experimental results are presented in which conical third-harmonic emission is generated from a sapphire sample.
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Slow light, induced dispersion, enhanced nonlinearity, and optical solitons in a resonator-array waveguide.
We describe an optical transmission line that consists of an array of wavelength-scale optical disk resonators coupled to an optical waveguide. Such a structure leads to exotic optical characteristics, including ultraslow group velocities of propagation, enhanced optical nonlinearities, and large dispersion with a controllable magnitude and sign. This device supports soliton propagation, which can be described by a generalized nonlinear Schrodinger equation.
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Honeycomb pattern formation by laser-beam filamentation in atomic sodium vapor.
We have observed transverse pattern formation leading to highly regular structures in both the near and far fields when a near-resonant laser beam propagates without feedback through an atomic sodium vapor. One example is a regular far-field honeycomb pattern, which results from the transformation of the laser beam within the vapor into a stable three-lobed structure with a uniform phase distribution and highly correlated power fluctuations. The predictions of a theoretical model of the filamentation process are in good agreement with these observations.
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